Sermon: NITZAVIM

Written by Rabbi Colin Eimer — 13 September 2021

We’re going into the season for confession and I want to confess to a love affair I’ve been having for the best part of 50 years. It’s always risky telling others about something that means a great deal to you – perhaps they won’t be moved by it the way you are. So, as they say in the classics, “be gentle with me” as I tell you more about this love affair.

It began in 1969. I was in Jerusalem for my 4^th year at Leo Baeck College. Some friends from London – including Alyth member Rolfe Roseman – were in Israel on a World Union of Jewish Students’ study scheme in Arad near Beersheva. I’d often go to spend Shabbat with them, and they asked if I would lead an occasional Bible study group for them and some of their fellow students.

That’s where the love affair began. It wasn’t with anybody in the group – though there were some very interesting possibilities….. – but with a text, just nine verses, in fact verses we read in the Torah this morning. For over half my life, now, they have retained their power to speak to me, to excite, stimulate, and challenge – everything a true lover should be.

They begin with a reminder that this mitzvah, this commandment, is not remote or distant from us. Nobody needs to go and bring it back to us. It’s here – in our mouth and in our heart – though it never spells out what the commandment actually is. Perhaps it’s the whole Torah; perhaps it’s that treasure each of us seeks, the key that will unlock our lives, somehow make clear the meaning and purpose we want to feel underlies our existence. But wherever it is, it’s not out there, though we all have to go on some sort of journey to look for it. But it’s not ‘up there’ or ‘over here.’ It’s a spiritual, not a geographical journey.

Far from being a journey out there it is one back home, back to our core, to find the treasure that’s been there all the time – that which makes each of us unique, a one-off. Rabbi Zusya said: “When I come to the final judgement, they won’t ask me, “Zusya, why in your life weren’t you more like Moses?”; but they will ask, “Zusya, why in your life weren’t you more like Zusya?”

It goes on: “See, I set before you today life and good, death and evil.” The Jewish affirmation of life. That’s what I fell in love with. When we drink we say l’chayyim, ‘to life’ – none of this ‘cheers’ or ‘bottoms up’ nonsense. One of my teachers suggested we say l’chayyim because whoever said the blessing for wine would then hold up their cup and say to the assembly, l’chayyim o’l’mavet, ‘to life or to death’ and everybody would call out: l’chayyim!

These few verses end with the phrase u’vacharta ba’chayyim, “therefore, choose life.” The Hebrew language requires the verb bachar ‘to choose’ to be linked with the following word – the thing you choose – by the letter beit which means ‘in,’ ‘into.’ Translated literally, therefore, u’vacharta ba’chayyim means “choose into life. In Jewish terms, you can’t passively choose life. That might be existing, but it’s not living. Judaism requires a commitment, that we actively choose ba’chayyim into life. We are called on to make an act of conscious engagement – interestingly, a word that also has it’s place in a love affair.

So we are called on to make a commitment and to make it hayom ‘today.’ Why, ask the Rabbis, does something that purportedly took place long ago use the word hayom as if we were being addressed today, in September 2021? In order, they reply, that nobody should think all this refers only to past generations. Each generation has to feel addressed, challenged by that choice between life and death, good and evil. In addition, the verb u’vacharta ‘choose’ is in the singular. It is a commitment that needs to be renewed hayom ‘today,’ every day, and by each individual.

Clearly it’s not talking literally about choosing physical life or death; it’s not the quantity of our existence that is in question here, but the quality of our lives.

As Abraham Joshua Heschel put it: “Simply being alive is no answer to the problems of living. To be or not to be is not the question” – to which I would add “not the real question” – Heschel concludes, “the vital question is: how to be and how not to be.” A question which has surely challenged us particularly and acutely these past 18 months. How do we choose life in the midst of a pandemic?

Choices are before us all the time. We have to choose between life and good or death and evil. Pairing up life and good, on the one hand, death and evil on the other, is very clever. Good and evil become respective commentaries on life and death. Life is good; death is evil. Once again, it’s not talking about actual, physical death. For me it speaks of a sort of death-in-life state that you sometimes see in people – a feeling of flatness about their existence; they seem to move from day to day, year to year, but little seems to move them, excite them, arouse their passion. “For the living know they will die,” we read in Ecclesiastes (9:5) “but the dead know nothing of it.” ‘The dead,’ interpret the rabbis, ‘are the wicked, who even in their lives are called dead.” (Berachot 18b)

The other side of saying that we have choice is of course that we become responsible for the choices we do make. We can’t continually blame things ‘out there’ for our difficulties. There comes a point where we have to choose life – because another way in which we opt for death-in-life is to deny our personal responsibility. If we do that too much and too long, we’re on the road to personality disintegration.

Rabbi Jonathan Romain recently invited colleagues to contribute an essay, a sermon, some reflections to a book he’s editing on the theme “what makes me angry?” I chose pessimists and pessimism. Well actually it was pessimists and necrophiles – but that’s another story. Now pessimists don’t really make me angry – but they disappoint me because their pessimism seems to be such a countervailing voice against those verses we read, that idea of choosing life.

So they speak to me of choice, obviously, but choice suggests task, responsibility, duty. Not always fashionable words – but surely of the very basics on which religion has to be built? A Judaism which doesn’t challenge me, ask me to re-examine the choices I have made, to try and purify my moral behaviour, would be worth little in my eyes.

You can see why my love is exigent, demanding, challenging, and certainly at times even uncomfortable.

It’s pure calendrical coincidence that we read about choosing life at this point in the Torah cycle, at this time of the Jewish year; but we couldn’t have found a more apposite text for these Days of Awe if we had tried. Those few verses are of the essence of what this season is about, and leave us with some of the questions we should be asking ourselves at this season.